


sweet pea

by UnderSelf



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Pregnancy, Reflection, There's a baby, Unplanned Pregnancy, post-reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28412211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderSelf/pseuds/UnderSelf
Summary: “You piss me off,” she says, running that same hand through his hair. “Doesn’t change what we are, though.”There are gentle movements punctuating their moment as the baby inside her flutters and tumbles against Jesse’s hand. She winces a little at the activity beside her navel.“And what are we?” Jesse asks, studying her face.“Family,” she says simply. Definitively.—Sequel to "bird dog"
Relationships: Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe/Jesse McCree
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	sweet pea

It’s an unease that shifts the morning calm. The cold snap hits him with the bitter mountain air, and it’s at this seedy little diner out in Wyoming where he stews with a newfound knowledge of secrets kept too long.

Painful, really. Seated at a booth on the edge of nowhere, looking for a face he isn’t sure he’s going to recognize. He isn’t usually a gambling man—not like the rest of the boys—and wherever those chips fell he was happy to take his winnings and scram before the stakes grew higher.

But this was different.

Eighteen years of his life fell under the thumb of Overwatch’s black ops—bribed to stay beneath their command or be jailed up with the rest of his crew for stealing the right loot at the wrong time. It created a rift in Deadlock’s shakey ranks, blowing the tattered lot of them to the four winds and dislodging whatever loyalty he had left in favor of saving himself a lifetime in prison.

Back then, that was a prospect much scarier than the bullets ricocheting off the old garage. He left something near and dear to scrounge up the leftovers and in turn, she soured under the Arizona sun.

Not that she wasn’t already a little sour. Ashe had the cunning of a seasoned desert brush dog, and they’d be damned if that hadn't been an asset in Deadlock’s founding. A year deep into Overwatch’s oppressive thumb would yield him a much better hand at espionage than he would’ve been... but Ashe and the gang were always on the forefront of his mind. He’d scan the local news just to see what they were up to, if they’d ever have managed to get up out of their grave.

They were doing well enough some several years in, with no question just who the rival gangs threw their cards at. At the center of an unspoken ceasefire down in Deadlock Gorge, there stood one Elizabeth Caledonia Calamity Ashe. She’d managed to scrounge up what was left and grow the gang into something that ticked every red flag on Blackwatch’s radar, and he was apt to see her through it. He’d showed up once on good intel that she was fixing to pull money out of some Russian’s pockets to fund infrastructure beneath Deadlock Gorge. Looked like she’d seen a ghost, with how crazy and wide her eyes were--red and angry and aiming down the barrel of her family’s pricey heirloom.

They didn’t talk much. He tipped her off on some cargo headed east, and she had B.O.B. throw him a couple of yards over, right into the dumpster outside their rendezvous. It felt too casual, too much like old times. She’d sneered at his ambivalence and he told her he’d write.

They wouldn’t see each other again for another eight years.

That’s neither here nor there, now. Jesse fidgets with a coin, studying the familiar angles of his waitress’s youthful face as she approaches with the coffee in hand, ready to pour.

She flashes him a smile—something genuine, something lovely—and asks, “regular or decaf?”

“Regular,” he replies, lifting his mug by his good arm, noting the beauty mark just under her left eye and amused by just how much that smile reminds him of her mother.

The girl pours his coffee and dips away as quickly as she approaches—just the ghost of her lingering as Jesse takes a sip and ruminates on all of what he wants to say to her, but doesn’t.

* * *

“Ever gonna talk about it?” he asks, about a week after his trip to Wyoming and five months, three arguments, and a lie too late. There’s one particularly expensive metal hand getting close to being sold for parts as it teases the ends of his partner’s hair; “Gettin’ kinda obvious,” he says. “Should talk about. Eventually.”

Ashe hums into her pillow, agitated by him—fingers tapping lightly over the swell of her belly as she tries to find some new and creative way to shut him up. Though he seems content beside her in silence, she opts to answer him with his own words anyway—“Eventually,” punctuating a hitch in her tone as she feels that familiar tumble making a punching bag of her insides. “When I want to.”

“Right.” Jesse’s brows furrow in that usual way, knitted with the uncertainty of a man who’s gone back and forth on the apparent nonchalance of his other half’s thoughts. They’d _already_ had an awful fight about this, so he inches a little closer to her to nudge away the insecurity and salve the wounds left from last time they ‘talked about it.’  
  
“Said I was sorry,” he reasons, trying to thread his way through her thoughts—trying to find a way to reach her from the fog of their predicament. “ _Liz_ —”

“— _Christ_ , here we go.” Ashe lifts herself up on her elbow as much as she can, frustration already at its boiling point as her mood bubbles over. “You had no business goin’ up to Wyoming—”

“—and you had no business bein’ pregnant.”

Jesse retorts as she brings his week-long absence to the forefront, knowing the seventeen years between them is still a barb that stings. He stares her down with it in mind, looks to her belly, looks back up again.  
  
Ashe meets his eye.

“That girl up there is _not ours_ ,” she says, sternly. “ _Stupid_ to mess with her head like that.”  
  
Jesse looks away again because she’s right. It’d been several months since they’d reconciled, talked it out. They’d laid themselves out in the bluebonnets along the vacant and empty remains of her family’s estate, the gang and the road behind them and B.O.B. off painting the siding on their ranch another acre over.  
  
It feels like a more distant memory, but it’s only been a few months. Her edges are a little more serrated now, but he remembers how soft and slow and vulnerable it was before all this—remembers how she left kisses along his jaw so sweet, he almost wasn’t sure if this was once the same woman at the head of the criminal underground.

They’d threaded themselves together in the midst of newly spoken sentiments—before the bombshell, before the arguments—and from their interlude, made something entirely new.

She had no business being pregnant seventeen years ago, but they’re here now, and though her mood often feels like it’s everywhere at once, he isn’t sure if it’s because she feels resentment for the past, or if she’s worried about something else entirely.  
  
He wants her to talk about it, but instead, she deflects.

So he tries again, his hand finding her arm and giving it a gentle squeeze.

“Can’t sit here and act like this ain’t affectin’ you somehow,” he says.

And though he loves her—something he hasn’t yet spoken, but knows for certain—it was a curse being Jesse McCree, having this innate kind of power to flip her mood in such a sour way, regardless of what was intended.

So she spat, pulling her arm away—vitriolic and without the filter she would have otherwise used to cushion others from her growing agitation: “Affectin’ me _how_?”

The truth of the matter was: they always ended up this way, when he would broach the topic of the daughter they didn’t know, versus the daughter they were going to know in another four months.

Jesse sits up, sighs. “We ain’t talked about it, yet,” he says. “You’re what, six, seven months along now? Ain’t normal.”

Ashe falls back into the pillows with little grace, frustrated, and her nerves exacerbated by these conversations she’s tired of having. “ _We_ ain’t normal, Jesse.”

He sighs at that, sweeps his hair from his face. “S’pose not.”

They’re quiet for the time being. Ashe snuggles into the pillows and Jesse sneaks his hand over her baby bump once she’s settled. Unspoken between them lingers that delicate thread of domesticity that he craves. He wishes for the normality of rubbing circles at her back, pitching names to the ceiling and wondering if they’d even make it long enough to agree on what color to paint the nursery.

He knows it’s not a first for her, and he can’t pick at her thoughts as easily as he can with other things. Ashe already understands what’s happening to her body, already knows what she’s in for by the end of it. It’s often what pulls Jesse from all the daydreaming and reinforces the present with the hopes that, eventually, she’ll feel like she’s able to talk about it with him.

They definitely were anything but normal, in that regard. Neither one of them discussed her pregnancy—not the one before, or the one now. It was by chance he’d found B.O.B. stocking their pantry with prenatals, finally putting two and two together once he realized she didn’t just fancy hanging over the rim of the toilet for the fun of it. Everything shifted gradually, in a mutual sort of understanding that they were going to have a baby in the most inconspicuous way possible.

But she’s about six or seven months along now, and she’s showing. Jesse’s left to wonder if she’s really going to keep playing it casual even after she’s _become_ the elephant in the room.

All of this brings his thoughts back to that daughter they have in Wyoming, and how a younger version of Ashe had dealt with her pregnancy seventeen years back. Maybe the child she left up north wasn’t really someone they could know, or had any right to know... But Jesse couldn’t ignore the reality that she was part of him, his daughter, but not his daughter. There was no knowing what Ashe felt about the past, but the small glimpses she allowed him made him wonder if she felt the same.  
  
They had a girl out there. A hard-working, self-assured, and self-sufficient girl—with a job, a car, and a cat named ‘Pepper.’

...And though she looked like auntie and mama and cousin McCree—that haystack of hers spiking out in every which direction, a spackle of neat little freckles adorning the bridge of her nose—she had her mama’s smile. Jesse knew that familiar smile. It was something sweet and charming and so rare to see, he’d never be able to shake the image of it.

After a moment, Jesse finds himself stumbling for the right words: “I’m just... Wonderin’ about how you’re feelin’.” He gets a little closer to her, lost in his own thoughts, wondering if this child is gonna look like her mama—if this child is gonna be hard headed, even tempered, or wily as a dusty desert coyote.

He furrows his brow against her shoulder, uncertainty in the seriousness of his voice. “Shouldn’t have a baby you don’t want.”

But something in the air changes right then.

Ashe sighs, allows herself to fall back into the comforts of that thousand thread count, and moves his hand to settle more easily on where her child currently pokes and prods.

“You know it’s late for that,” she whispers, with Jesse shifting to accommodate for her space. There’s more on her mind than she is willing to say, and she’s much quieter in that moment than she’s been in the moments before.

She closes what little gap is left between them on the bed, breathing her words against his chin as the baby's heel glides beneath the press of his palm; “Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want her, Jesse.”

It’s a weak affirmation in light of everything, but Jesse smiles, presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth, and contemplates the layers in Ashe’s voice that pose questions he’s not sure to ask. There are still seventeen years between them, and they’re hardly one year into this new life he’s found with her, so he thinks maybe she needs more time, more space.  
  
He feels her hand cupping his cheek, feels her lips on his. He’s drawn back from his doubts.  
  
“You piss me off,” she says, running that same hand through his hair. “Doesn’t change what we are, though.”

There are gentle movements punctuating their moment as the baby inside her flutters and tumbles against Jesse’s hand. She winces a little at the activity beside her navel.  
  
“And what are we?” Jesse asks, studying her face.

“Family,” she says simply. Definitively.  
  


* * *

Their (second) daughter is born in the early hours, her lungs open and loudly proclaiming her discomfort even before dawn. Her wails echo off the shallow walls of their suite as she’s wrapped and placed in the warmth of her mother’s arms, howling and fussing and flailing at the cold newness of the world.

Ashe looks around rather dazedly, clutching securely at the child and hardly feeling Jesse’s presence as he hovers. He smiles wide from beside them both, his heart open far too much to have to bear against the loud bustle of the room, and he runs the pad of his finger over their daughter’s cheek. Ashe offers him a glance as he marvels over this little thing she’s just brought into the world.

“Look at you…” he says, softest he’s ever sounded. A sleepless grit and dryness cracks his voice from the hours they’ve been here, but he runs his fingers along the newborn’s wispy hair as though he’s not even remotely as dog-tired as he looks. “‘Ey there baby girl—”

“—that’s Daddy, Sweet Pea.”Ashe tilts their daughter for Jesse to see, nearly boneless in the hospital bed, but managing to muster the strength to sit up more comfortably and rest her head back against the pillow. 

Jesse smoothes some of the hair from Ashe’s face, rests his forehead against her temple and watches as she counts ten for ten. 

“Beautiful,” he whispers. 

Ashe watches him with tired eyes, a quiet confession teetering on the edge of their excursion. She tells him, “It’s strange bein’ here again,” venturing back into the unvoiced columns of thought clouding the last nine months.  
  
Jesse offers her a quick glance, smile never fading, eyes fixated on the infant nestled in Ashe’s arms. “Never thought you would be?”

He’s careful to tread as lightly as he can, still not really knowing where she is or what she’s thinking.  
  
She responds, “Not the first time, no,” recalling that seventeen years between them, that girl in Wyoming, and the bittersweet memories of cradling someone just as small, just as helpless. . “Yet here I am.”

  
The baby nuzzles and settles like a heavy weight in the crook of her mother’s arm, shadowed only by the presence of her father, who presses a kiss to the crown of her head before he leans back into his own chair beside them. Ashe takes the opportunity to peel back the hospital gown for their daughter to nurse, and it’s all Jesse can do to watch—leaning on his knuckles in that hard leather chair—and appreciating a sweet and unusual sort of gentleness in the upward quirk in his other half’s smile.

It’s a special thing to see—Ashe smiling. Ashe smiling so genuinely at this small someone she’s chosen to share with him and that he’s spent more than a year trying to figure out. It may not have been as complicated as it seemed.

Maybe he’s overthinking it.

When she turns back to catch him staring, she chuffs and raises a brow. “ _What_?”

But he keeps smiling, taking in the scene—ignoring the sour tone that’s glued itself to her every whim and word.  
  
“Yet here you are,” he says. “Here we are.”


End file.
